September 4, 2013

Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, agreed to meet me at 11 a.m. on a recent Saturday. Kagame’s office is on top of a hill near the center of Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, and I took a taxi there, driven by a man in a suit and tie. Whenever I’m in Kigali, I am always impressed by how spotless it is, how the city hums with efficiency, which is all the more remarkable considering that Rwanda remains one of the poorest nations in the world. Even on a Saturday morning, platoons of women in white gloves rhythmically swept the streets, softly singing to themselves. I passed the Union Trade Center mall in the middle of town, where traffic circulates smoothly around a giant fountain. There was no garbage in the streets and none of the black plastic bags that get tangled up in the fences and trees of so many other African cities — Kagame’s government has banned them.

There were no homeless youth sleeping on the sidewalks or huffing glue to kill their hunger. In Rwanda, vagrants and petty criminals have been scooped up by the police and sent to a youth “rehabilitation center” on an island in the middle of Lake Kivu that some Rwandan officials jokingly call their Hawaii — because it is so lush and beautiful — though people in Kigali whisper about it as if it were Alcatraz. There aren’t even large slums in Kigali, because the government simply doesn’t allow them.

The night before, I strolled back to my hotel from a restaurant well past midnight — a stupid idea in just about any other African capital. But Rwanda is one of the safest places I’ve been, this side of Zurich, which is hard to reconcile with the fact that less than 20 years ago more civilians were murdered here in a three-month spree of madness than during just about any other three-month period in human history, including the Holocaust. During Rwanda’s genocide, the majority Hutus turned on the minority Tutsis, slaughtering an estimated one million men, women and children, most dispatched by machetes or crude clubs. Rwandans say it is difficult for any outsider to appreciate how horrifying it was. Nowadays, it’s hard to find even a jaywalker.

Clinton, ?, Usher?, Alicia Keyes?,
Quincy Jones, and Kagame in back

No country in Africa, if not the world, has so thoroughly turned itself around in so short a time, and Kagame has shrewdly directed the transformation. Measured against many of his colleagues, like the megalomaniac Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who ran a beautiful, prosperous nation straight into the ground, or the Democratic Republic of Congo’s amiable but feckless Joseph Kabila, who is said to play video games while his country falls apart, Kagame seems like a godsend. Spartan, stoic, analytical and austere, he routinely stays up to 2 or 3 a.m. to thumb through back issues of The Economist ...

The story goes on to offer a number of interesting vignettes, like Kagame beating with a stick subordinates who spent too much on drapes for the office. And it has some good insights, such as that Rwandans have been fairly well organized since Burton and Speke visited them in the in 1860s.

But, it's kind of lacking in the bigger picture of the endemic struggle between Nilotics and Bantus, in Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda (where Kagame was once a right hand man to the current dictator) and the Congo, where Kagame has been plundering for decades.

I briefly wrote about it in 2008. Back in 1995, Barack Obama Jr., who is half-Luo, noted the distinction in Kenya between "tall, ink-black Luos and short, brown Kikuyus." His Luo relatives assured him, "The Luo are intelligent but lazy."

The Bantus, by weight of numbers, tended to get the upper hand in decolonization's one-man-one-vote-once era, but the Nilotics have been making an impressive comeback, with Raila Odinga (the son of Barack Obama Sr.'s political hero) just losing the Presidency of Kenya to Uhuru Kenyatta (the descendant of Barack Sr.'s enemy) in the recent election.

Most remarkably, even in the United States, where the African-American population is overwhelmingly Bantu, the Nilotics are doing well in World War N. The American President is half Nilotic and not at all Bantu.

77 comments:

This reminds me of this guy, Stromae. He's currently very big in France as a singer. The name is just verlan (backwards slang) from "maestro". He's half Belgian and half Rwandan. Looks very Nilotic, so I'm assuming his dad was a Tutsi.

He seems like a smart guy. This song is called "Daddy where are you?" Surprise, surprise, he was raised entirely by his Belgian mom. But there IS something there musically. This is pretty striking too.

I like Paul Kagame. He was a great military leader in the war against the former Rwandan government as well as Mobutu's Zaire, and he seems to be singlehandedly turning Rwanda into a developing country that's actually developing. He's ruthless as hell of course, but in service of his country rather than himself, and he's not in a part of the world that rewards nice guys.

I beg to differ sir. Firstly a negligible proportion of african americans is of bantu ancestry as their origins lie in west africa a region without a bantu speaking population. In fact this is obvious by comparing an american to a bantu versus a west african. West africans are bigger, stronger and more handsome. Secondly the luo are genetically indistinct from their kenyan bantu neighbours and cluster with them compared to other nilotics such as the dinka and nuer of south sudan. I understand where you are coming from. Why let the facts stop a good story, right. This is a rather naive way of explaining differences in african societies. A second example of this hypothesis might add to it more weight

Hello from Uganda (well in Asia fro the week but back to Kampala on Mondy)!

Btw the Western Uganda has a pastoralist/agricultural divide much like Rwanda (and even the DRC; I think it's prevalent throughout Eastern Africa extending to Tanzania/Kenya) and the Bahima Monarchy of the West is the only one of the 6/7 traditional kingdoms of Uganda that haven't been restored.

Rwandan women are renowned in Uganda for being beauties and interestingly enough at Serbian bbq on Sunday I publicly complimented this lovely girl for being an exemplar of Ugandan beauty. Turns out she was Rwandan...

In the article on “Who are Bahororo?” it was mentioned that men do not marry Bantu women. Some readers have asked me to elaborate in order to understand why they don’t. Although Bahororo (Batutsi from Rwanda), Bahima and Batutsi cousins speak Bantu language, they are ethnically different from Bantu people, hence the use of Nilotic Bahororo and their cousins in the heading. At one time it was erroneously believed that Bahororo and their cousins were white people, but scientific studies have demonstrated conclusively and definitively that they are black people and darker with thicker lips than Bantu people – no disrespect is intended (J. D. Fage A History of Africa 1995 & Jean Hiernaux The People of Africa 1975). Although Bahororo and their cousins do not marry Bantu (Bairu and Bahutu) women they use them frequently for sexual pleasure and even produce children together. More references will be provided for those who would like to read more on the subject. Many quotations will also be used to avoid misinterpretation of authors’ messages.

According to John Hanning Speke (The Discovery of the Source of the Nile 1863, 2006) Bairu people (slaves) theoretically refers to all Bantu people south of the Nile. However, because of extensive intermarriage between Nilotic and Bantu people in Bunyoro, Buganda and Toro, entirely new communities were created and the ethnic distinction disappeared. This article will therefore refer to Bahororo, Bahima and Batutsi of southwest Uganda (Ankole and Rujumbura) and Rwanda and Burundi where Nilotic men do not marry Bahutu and Bairu women. It is important to add at this juncture that when wealthy and/or educated Bairu and Bahutu men marry Bahororo, Bahima and Batutsi women, they marry them mostly from relatively poor families. Thus, Bahororo, Bahima and Batutsi women from wealthy or royal families do not marry Bairu or Bahutu men reminiscent of medieval Europe where the nobility married among itself (John Merriman A History of Modern Europe 1996).

Although Bahororo and their cousins argue that they do not marry Bairu and Bahutu women because they are not pretty, historians and anthropologists and other commentators have given a different reason. One of them states that “… the Hima and Tutsi of the southwestern highland zone [southwest Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda] did not mix so freely. They avoided intermarriage and by keeping themselves distinct they managed, in time, to establish a position of domination over the majority peasants [Bairu and Bahutu] cultivators of the region” (Kevin Shillington History of Africa1989).

African Americans are not "overwhelmingly Bantu". As the wiki article says, Bantu speakers occupy the most easterly region of Cameroon, and parts of Central, Eastern and Southern Africa. Virtually none of them reside in West Africa.

When I saw all those Western leaders in the same picture as Kagame, the first thing that came to mind was the Roman empire in the 4th and 5th centuries. I can easily imagine how the Roman emperors meeting with the various barbarian chiefs probably had the same dynamics. We have these soft civilized leaders who patronizingly pat their barbarian clients on the head, little do they know that those barbarians will one day rule and ravage their offspring.

And yes I do know that the Roman emperors were brutal killers as well, but the society they represented was degenerate, weak and in terminal decline.

Funny, Rwandan modern history sounds like early Roman Republic history.

It´s very interesting to see the birth of nations, as our ancient European and European-descended nations are dying. From our vantage view, Rwanda can make it to the end of the century only if 1) they have a large enough smart fraction that can absorb Western culture and science (unknown, but possible) 2) if the average IQ of the population is near 90 (I fear Hutus drag the average down) 3) the current regime holds on after Kagame is out 4) They reduce the Hutu population trough eugenics (rather than genocide, but whatever works) 5) They prevent non-Tutsi inmigration (that is, if the Rwandan government can keep the riff raff out, which in African terms, is nearly all of the continent)If Rwanda fails to take these measures, disease, famine and war will eradicate the country once Africa reaches a population of over four billion at the end of the century.

I've always wondered why Kagame wasn't featured much in Hotel Rwanda. The movie also didn't mention Mobutu's role in supporting the Hutu militia and also allowing militant Hutus cross the border back and forth from Zaire very easily.

He seems far more efficient than virtually any other African leader. Leave it to some white guy from the New York Times to rain on the parade with hypocritical western "values".

As many other here have noted, white people have done more rankly brutal things in the last two centuries than anyone else (genocide, institutional slavery, the creation and use of WMDs, gulags, concentration camps, etc.), but then one fine day, they discovered they has a Conscience, and decided to get preachy with the rest of the world.

Kagame's a pretty cool Prussian type ruler. Obama is rather lame by comparison, but better than I feared - and he assassinated Bin Laden, which combined with the lack of any more Vietnam quagmires on his watch so far puts him two up on Dubya.

The success of HEP and BUTLER pretty much shows that this country is lost. MLK-ism and Oprah-ism are the new religions of this country, especially among whites. There is really no hope for white consciousness revival. It's too far gone. For every Takimag reader, there are 100,000 Butlerites among whites.

Slate and Huffington has millions of likes on facebook. Takimag has a few thousand.

Kagame probably ordered the 1994 assassination by surface-to-air missile of Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira. He did that in the knowledge it could start a mass killings, and calculating it would lead to an opportunity for him to invade, which it did. France indited close aids of Kagame and own former ambassador to the US said that Kagame admitted it. Kagame has managed to get the international community to accept his version which was that Habyarimana was killed by extremists on his own side. Kagame is very clever.

I've always wondered about the remarkable differences between immigrants from Africa and the Black Americans descended from slaves.

I was convinced that many of the newcomers adjust better because of certain different values, culture and charm that enable them to recognize opportunities to which slave-descendants are blind. I don't know what explains this difference. Of course it is a question so sensitive that no serious study is possible.

Permit me to speculate... Generations of slavery, racism and segregation have cultivated a sense of paranoia, entitlement and general dysfunction that still plague America's Black minority. Perhaps if America's Blacks see racism, profiling, and disadvantage everywhere, the solution might be for them to join a community where the majority superficially looks like they do. Of course in Africa they would still be subject to discrimination and profiling because Africans are realistic to understand that "diversity" is more complicated than just Black vs. White.

Great. They've discovered the solution to poverty, homelessness, and liter and it's just as simplistic as young liberals always believed it was. All the government needs to do is outlaw it and it will magically disappear.

"Never did get this whole "Rwanda is the west's great shame" thing. When did we get appointed the world's sheriff?"

It's more of a European thing than an American thing. Since Europe no longer has the ability to project any real military power, and because it's economy is in slow terminal decline, it's taken upon itself "moral leadership". Which doesn't mean much beyond complaining constantly and threatening to withhold foreign aid (but never actually doing so). David Cameron tried something like this a while ago when he threatened to stop British aid to Commonwealth countries that would not legalize homosexuality. In response Uganda and Ghana said they would not take the aid, at which time Cameron lamely reversed course.

"I've always wondered about the remarkable differences between immigrants from Africa and the Black Americans descended from slaves."...

"I don't know what explains this difference."

Cultural rot radiates from the centers of civilization. The more provincial a place, the less rot. The least decadent parts of Europe are the most provincial ones. Belarus, for example. I think the 1960s revolution only reached Spain and Portugal in the late 1970s. Whit Stillman's "Barcelona" alludes to this. Why? Iberia has always been a relative backwater. The 1960s revolution only reached the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Russia has lagged the West both during the West's rise and during its fall.

The least decadent parts of the US are Utah, small-town Midwest, wherever the Amish live.

When civilization is on the rise, its centers radiate culture. When civilization is dying, its centers radiate rot.

Africa is such a backwater that some of the manners and educational practices that European missionaries brought to it during the colonial period are still alive there.

During the Dark Ages Ireland retained a relatively high amount of literate culture. Why Ireland? Because during the Roman period it was the ultimate backwater. Not even a part of the empire.

We really need to clarify whether we are talking about linguistic or genetic categories. Anonymous notes that the Luo are by appearance indistinguishable from the Kikuyu (although Obama's comments appear to differ on that). The Luo do speak a Nilotic language, unrelated to the Bantu Kikuyu language, but that in itself doesn't tell us about their genetic heritage.

I finally got around to reading A Bend in the River, and with that and Coup, Black Mischief and Scoop, I'm noticing a definite pattern: A native semi-educated black offered up as the Big-Man ruler by foreign interests.

Is that normal? Did a bunch of foreigners have to groom and prop up the Founding Fathers?

Permit me to speculate... Generations of slavery, racism and segregation have cultivated a sense of paranoia, entitlement and general dysfunction that still plague America's Black minority. Perhaps if America's Blacks see racism, profiling, and disadvantage Anonymous: everywhere, the solution might be for them to join a community where the majority superficially looks like they do. Of course in Africa they would still be subject to discrimination and profiling because Africans are realistic to understand that "diversity" is more complicated than just Black vs. White.

As a child of said immigrants I agree with your assessment. I've often commented that much of African-American political discourse seems irrational and paranoid. They often seem very obsessed with Whites to the point of neurosis. The Trayvon Martin debacle was a perfect example of this phenomenon.

Also even among Africans they notice things. My folks are Ashanti who had a relatively sophisticated culture by African standards and were able to hold off the British for 100 years or so. As such the Ashanti have a reputation of being very arrogant in Ghana. They also tend to regard the Northern areas of the country as backward Muslim dominated areas not worthy of much consideration. Oh and Ghanaians tend to think most of the violent crime there is a result of Nigerians. .

In America race is paramount a Chechen family that stays here long enough can morph into a WASP depending on how well the family assimilates. In most of the world ethnicity is paramount. That's why Syria is going to be an even bigger cluster than Iraq.

At the end of the day much of Africa, including Ghana, will probably never develop because of the issues often discussed on this blog. If Kagame can buck the trend he should be given a Nobel Peace prize and elevated to one of world history's greats.

He seems far more efficient than virtually any other African leader. Leave it to some white guy from the New York Times to rain on the parade with hypocritical western "values".

As many other here have noted, white people have done more rankly brutal things in the last two centuries than anyone else (genocide, institutional slavery, the creation and use of WMDs, gulags, concentration camps, etc.), but then one fine day, they discovered they has a Conscience, and decided to get preachy with the rest of the world.

Take a hike, Whitey!

Darkie's envious, duplicitous spin on how whites dominate global morals game (your ancestors took slaves? If you're non-white, hey, no biggie, everybody did it. If you're white? Well, some of them actually put an end to the slave trade, so you're bad-Bad-BAD!).

Whites have done (and more importantly, kept detailed records of) more things than anyone else, period. Of course that means they've done more bad things than anyone else. They also gave you your Conscience, with which you now castigate your betters.

Yes, people with responsibilities make more damaging mistakes than people with none. Welcome to real life.

Great insight by Glossy! Jibes with what I know from Roman history: Syria was a backwater, and Roman civilization held out there a surprisingly long time.

For more on this, and to understand just how special a place Syria is, and why the Islamist radicals would want to destroy it, I can recommend Dalrymple's From the Holy Mountain: A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East.

@Carol,did you notice the passage about the arrogant Tutsis being carried around by shorter Bantus?===I have a Congolese friend who's half Tutsi : The ethnic consciousness and pride of those people is real. He's not a hardcore racist but every now and then he will remark on the indolence of the more Bantu Congolese who are only interested in sex and beer while he and his fellow herdsmen worry about making money and owning cows etc. Interestingly, my friend tells me that Tutsis feel a kinship with the Fulani. I think they they must have common ancestry and I'm thinking they they go back to the wet sahara of 8000 years ago.

===

The term Nilotic used here is problematic. Are we talking about somewhat light skinned, tall but caucasoid featured aethiopids like the Tutsis, the Hima and their cousins ? Are we talking about the extremely tall but ink black and rather non caucasoid looking Dinkas, Nuers and maybe the Luo ?Both groups tend to be herders and I think that they've been rubbing shoulders for a while but they have to be genetically distinct.

@Mike in Boston :it sends a chilldown my spine to think that we may live to see the end of the christian communities in the middle-east, even though they've held off for 2000 years over there.

===To those who were speculating about Tutsi IQ and their civilizational potential:While Tutsis are, like a lot of herders, a masterful martial race, I'm not sure they they're that smart. The way I see it, we have an example of a country full of quasi-Tutsis and it's called Somalia. They're good at waging civil war and being racist against crop raising blacks ( seen as slaves)but they haven't yet found a way to apply themselves to building a functional modern civilization.

It seems that Tutsis and cousins do best not when they're living by themselves in a country but when they're the besieged minority ruling with an iron fist over a despised agricultural lower class.

In another case of life imitating onion, the leader of the notorious femen group has been revealed as a man.

And not just any man,

He was quite horrible with the girls. He would scream at them and call them bitches.”

The man himself:

“They don’t have the strength of character. They don’t even have the desire to be strong. Instead, they show submissiveness, spinelessness, lack of punctuality, and many other factors which prevent them from becoming political activists. These are qualities which it was essential to teach them.”

Kagame is the man. Anybody who can get s**t done in Rwanda deserves respect.

His early 90s hip hop career wasn't half bad either. He filled many a dance floor in 1990 with the "Humpty Dance."

But that was back when most hip hop was fun, party music. Too bad hip hop isn't more like that today. Too much talk about "poppin' Molly," doin' coke, killin' ni**az, and defiling other dudes' hoez.

Hopefully in between making the trains run on time in Rwanda, Kagame can call on his new music industry pals like Usher and Alisha Keys to help him revive his career and bring back Humpty. Maybe instead of collaborating with guys like Ludacris and Pitbull, the next Usher track can have a Kagame/Humpty cameo.

I would like to correct the text a bit: Tutsis living in Rwanda and Burundi have clear Ethiopid characteristics. They are not Nilotes. Nilotes live in southern Sudan, Uganda and Kenya (e.g. Dinka, Nuer, Kalenjin, Turkana, Maasai etc.) and phylogenetically, they are as distant to Ethiopids (Ethiopians, Somalians, Tutsis) as to Eskimos.

Furthermore, it is interesting that in the genetic study of Tishkoff et al. (2009), the Luos turned out to be of predominantly Bantu origin. In other words, they are mostly Bantus speaking a Nilotic language.

Yeah, sure, I believe you bro...you're not just some person on the internet pretending to be African.

"I have a Congolese friend who's half Tutsi : The ethnic consciousness and pride of those people is real. He's not a hardcore racist but every now and then he will remark on the indolence of the more Bantu Congolese who are only interested in sex and beer while he and his fellow herdsmen worry about making money and owning cows etc.Interestingly, my friend tells me that Tutsis feel a kinship with the Fulani."

I believe you...you're not just some person on the internet pretending to have a half-Tutsi Congolese friend. The Tutsi and Fulani have nothing in common beyond a supposed affinity with "Caucasians". An affinity which, in Africa, has never been grounds for kinship--evidenced by numerous conflicts among peoples in the Horn. Yet, your definitely-not-imaginary friend feels kinship with the Fulani. I believe you.

For those pointing out that the West Africans and Bantus are not one and the same, I thought that they were at least closely related physiologically and genetically, much more so than either one is to the Nilotics. The Bantu expansion did originate in Cameroon, which tells me that they must have been one of several subsets of West African peoples at the time. Is there really that much difference (other than linguistic) between the Bantus of the Congo and the average Nigerian?

Speaking of the Bantu expansion, I've always found it fascinating how they utterly swamped the Khoisan/Bushmen people of Southern Africa. Before the expansion the Khoisan were pretty much the sole inhabitants of that region. Also interesting is that if you follow the Out-of-Africa theory, the Khoisan are the most archaic of the human races, and it is likely that the vast majority of non-African humanity is more closely related to the Khoisan than the Bantus.

Glossy: I think the 1960s revolution only reached Spain and Portugal in the late 1970s. Whit Stillman's "Barcelona" alludes to this. Why? Iberia has always been a relative backwater. The 1960s revolution only reached the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Russia has lagged the West both during the West's rise and during its fall.

Poor examples. Look up the Spanish Civil War (local anarchists destroyed churches, murdered priests & nuns). Franco's dictatorship followed until the mid-70s. Portugal had Salazar, followed by the rule of the Generals into the 70s as well.

The hard right held the line in these countries.

Even the Soviets had bootleg Beatles albums sold on the street. I've watched a 1961 BBC documentary (courtesy of Adam Curtis on his weblog) filmed inside George, Azerbaijan & the Caucasian region which showed how Soviet youth had adopted Western fashions. The cut-glass accented English commentator marveled at how these trends migrated mysteriously beyond the Iron Curtain.

Similarly, one sees Africans and Papua New Guineans walking around in t-shirts bearing Western corporate logos, the names of celebrities and wearing the latest Nike & Reebok running shoes.

The story goes on to offer a number of interesting vignettes, like Kagame beating with a stick subordinates who spent too much on drapes for the office.

Let's not lose sight of the fact that he has the power to act like that and get away with it. Handing the same power to supervisors in government offices, and teachers, would provide some interesting results, as well.

A Google image search for "Rwandan women" turned up a mixed bag. Some were stunning, others were not attractive at all.

That's a big contrast for what you get with an image search for "Swedish women," but then again photographers are subject to much of the same marketing as everyone else, and Swedish women have great marketing. Photos of Swedish women are posted online almost exclusively for the reason of illustrating their beauty.

For example, suggested alternative searches for Swedish women include "average Swedish women", implying that a lot of Google users are curious about peeking behind the marketing.

Suggested alternative searches for Rwandan women include "genocide," indicating that the main reason you're posting/looking for images of Rwandan women is to give/get a particular angle on what took place in 1994.

Finally, I also did a search for "Ugandan women." I agree, the Rwandans are generally better looking.

My experience with the beauty of African women, supported by today's Google session, is that it's very pockety. I've seen women from all parts of Africa that are drop dead gorgeous, and also some that are decidedly...not. Probably divides better to tribes than countries, which would explain larger concentrations of beauties in Rwanda than in Uganda.

Let's not lose sight of the fact that he has the power to act like that and get away with it. Handing the same power to supervisors in government offices, and teachers, would provide some interesting results, as well.

How (Starship Troopers) Heinlein of you. Much as I'd like to see this sort of treatment meted out to the most egregiously disgusting members of the left, I'd rather not give their commissars the lawful right to apply rubber truncheons on my knees for insufficiently respecting their politically correct principles.

Why was it able to do so until such a late date? Franco and Salazar were throwbacks, anachronisms by centers-of-civilization standards. But there is a pattern here: Iberia had lagged behind those centers for centuries, early on in good things, later in bad ones. The only constancy was lagging. In that sense there was nothing surprising in Franco's and Salazar's careers. It's not an N = 2 situation. There is a larger historical pattern here with many more data points.

Even the Soviets had bootleg Beatles albums sold on the street.

That's the most superficial bit of the 1960s revolution imaginable. If you could cite widespread drug use and the relaxation of sexual morals, you'd have a point. But those things didn't come to Russia until the 1990s.

Spain & Portugal both began great navigation, voyages of discovery, maritime empires and new world colonization programs (the Caribbean, both Americas, Africa, Indian sub-continent & Indonesia) before the Dutch, the French and the British. I can't quite consider it the behaviour of retarded backwaters.

Soviet bloc dissidents drew inspiration from a lot of '60s/'70s rock music - Vaclav Havel, the Czechoslovak free republic's first President initially preferred to do business with Frank Zappa rather than the U.S. government.

Marlo said......I believe you...you're not just some person on the internet pretending to have a half-Tutsi Congolese friend. ===gee, I've been pretending to be a hbd friendly black caribbean guy for almost 10 years in the altrighto-sphere and until you came along no one ever called my bluff. You're good, marlo.I mean, it's not like a black person could hold unusual views or something. Right.===The Tutsi and Fulani have nothing in common beyond a supposed affinity with "Caucasians". An affinity which, in Africa, has never been grounds for kinship--evidenced by numerous conflicts among peoples in the Horn. Yet, your definitely-not-imaginary friend feels kinship with the Fulani. I believe you.====You can believe whatever you want.

Tutsis obviously come from the north and are related to large subsets of the somalians. I don't see why the ancestors of the Tutsis, the somalis and the fulani couldn't have been herding cattle together 8000 years ago from the Atlantic coast to the red sea. I have no proof but I'm speculating on a blog here, not publishing a paper.

It wasn't. However, you also cannot deny that both countries fell far behind during the 17th and 18th centuries, and by the American Revolution had become so weak that the collapse of their New World empires was inevitable. The US was already making plans to eventually cross the Mississippi and take New Spain by force, but were forced to buy it after Spain sold it to France.

I've been intrigued that Rwanda has joined The (formerly British ) CommonwealthSeems that the thinking is that fortune and history favors anglosphere/anglophone nations rather than francophone ones and if you were unfortunate enough to miss out first time around it is never too late to try to change outcomes

"Darkie's envious, duplicitous spin on how whites dominate global morals game (your ancestors took slaves? If you're non-white, hey, no biggie, everybody did it. If you're white? Well, some of them actually put an end to the slave trade, so you're bad-Bad-BAD!).

Whites have done (and more importantly, kept detailed records of) more things than anyone else, period. Of course that means they've done more bad things than anyone else. They also gave you your Conscience, with which you now castigate your betters.

Yes, people with responsibilities make more damaging mistakes than people with none. Welcome to real life.'

I don't always agree with you Svigor, but you always come up with the most incitful and honest response. Knowing what I know about black, brown, red and yellow history and current behavior, the idea that white's were any worse is laughable. If it weren't for whites, there'd be no context at all for such judgments. And they sure wouldn't be discussing them using computers and conceptualized morality.

"I've been intrigued that Rwanda has joined The (formerly British ) CommonwealthSeems that the thinking is that fortune and history favors anglosphere/anglophone nations rather than francophone ones and if you were unfortunate enough to miss out first time around it is never too late to try to change outcomes"

Because of France's support of the Hutus, Kagame has been working overtime to change Rwanda into an English-speaking country. English is now the language of instruction in education and government, and French is being slowly expunged from public life.

In the documentary Civilization, Kenneth Clark mentioned a possible causal connection between the Renaasaince and the plague; the post plague generation had their dead relative's wealth, cheaper land, and laborers were in higher demand so they could make more money. In a similar way, could the Rwandan genocide have given the country an economic boost?

Firstly a negligible proportion of african americans is of bantu ancestry as their origins lie in west africa a region without a bantu speaking population.

"Bantu" is a language classification of course, not a "racial" one. In any event, both East/south African "Bantu" and non-Bantu speakers in West Africa are united across the continent by the PN2 transition of DNA Haplogroup E.

Funny, Rwandan modern history sounds like early Roman Republic history. And this sounds like complete nonsense, but carry on old chap.... lol

I was convinced that many of the newcomers adjust better because of certain different values, culture and charm that enable them to recognize opportunities to which slave-descendants are blind. I don't know what explains this difference. Of course it is a question so sensitive that no serious study is possible.

Actually African immigrants to the United States tend to be disproportionately the better educated and financed. And immigrants within all ethnic groups, at various times and places, have demonstrated better adjustments than "the natives." For example, Italian imigrants to the US during the mass immigration era were considered by some contemporary observers to be harder working and less criminal than other whites, like the Irish. See Sowell 1981. African immigrants are nothing special, and "slave descendants" aren't "blind" to opportunity.

Svigor says:Whites have done (and more importantly, kept detailed records of) more things than anyone else, period. Of course that means they've done more bad things than anyone else. They also gave you your Conscience, with which you now castigate your betters.

Laughable nonsense. Since when did white people "invent" the "conscience"?

The above proferred link shows the runinations of an amateur who thinks he is a specialist on genetics. His claims are flatly contradicted by credible peer-reviewed scholarship. In his blog post he admits: "I have no Hutu samples" yet he asserts this big "genetic difference" between Tutsi and Hutu. He doesnt even have the sampling to make that claim, and he further admits that his sampling base is ONE individual.. whoa.... really impressive.. lol. By contrast credible scholars show that actually the people most genetically related to the Tutsi, are, wait for it, Hutu- yes Hutu. Dang! There goes the "racial" angle.. Sorry...

"The second annual World Happiness Report, released Monday, finds the highest levels of happiness in Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Sweden, all in northern Europe. The lowest ranked were Rwanda, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Benin and Togo, all in Africa."

I suppose that "credible" geneticists have also proved that White americans are genetically closer to Black americans than to various Europeans. I mean, Black and White americans speak the same language and share a lot of aspects of their respectivee culture, so it must mean that they're genetically closest.

Never mind that Tutsis look a lot like Somalis. Tutsis must look like Somalis because of their social role as herders. If hutus started herding cattle, they'd start looking like Tutsis in no time. It's all social I tell ya!

It's like in Mexico, where the short brown men with the most on the ball tend to have children and grandchildren who are taller and fairer than them. That's how you can have such a stable mostly white ruling class over 490 years: the best men from the mestizo and Indian ranks are allowed to marry into the whiter social ranks.

Thus, in "Hotel Rwanda," the hero is a short Hutu of high competence -- he's the head manager of a big hotel. His wife is a tall Tutsi.

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